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Websites alienate Firefox users

Some 100 leading consumer sites were assessed by web-testing firm SciVisum.

Websites that proved difficult for Firefox users to navigate included the government website Jobcentreplus.gov.uk and the cinema site Odeon.co.uk.

Firefox is an open source alternative to Microsoft's Internet Explorer and has proved popular since its launch in November last year.

While most people still use Microsoft's browser, Firefox is slowly making inroads.

Its share of the browser market grew to 8% in May, up from 5.59% at the beginning of the year, according to US-based analysts NetApplications.

Microsoft IE's share of the market dropped to 87.23% in May, compared to 90.31% in January.

Of the websites that SciVisum tested, 3% were found to be turning away non Internet Explorer (IE) users and 7% of the sites included non-standard code recognised only by Microsoft's browser.

"Surprisingly, after all these years, users of standard-compliant browsers are still faced with sites that do not support their browser or with a link suggesting they download Internet Explorer," said Deri Jones, chief executive of SciVisum.

This is largely because web developers are used to testing their sites just using IE rather than so-called standards-compliant browsers, which only use code ratified by the World Wide Web consortium.

"There is a certain business logic to this as IE is the most widely used browser," said Mr Jones.
Microsoft is working on a new version of IE, largely in response to the success of Firefox.

Web developers who create code around the web standards recommended by the World Wide Web stand to gain more than just friends among the alternative browser community.

It will also make it easier for disabled people to use, said Mr Jones.

"Over time developers have begun to misuse the original standards created for the web to create websites that look great to you and I, but are confusing to a disabled person using a screen reader which needs to make sense of the content," he said.

Simplifying things by separating content from presentation will have a third benefit in that it will make it easier for sites to be picked up by search engines, he added.

Firefox has been created by the Mozilla Foundation which was started by former browser maker Netscape back in 1998.

The group is an open source organisation which means that the creators of the browser are happy for others to play around with the core code for the program.

Firefox is proving popular because, at the moment, it has far fewer security holes than Internet Explorer and has some innovations lacking in Microsoft's program.

More in Tux Machines

Before ending out March, here's some new OpenGL Linux benchmarks comparing the closed-source Catalyst 15.3 Beta driver against the Linux 4.0 development kernel with Mesa 10.6 Git for the freshest open-source graphics driver code.

5 questions to determine if open source is a good fit for a software project

A benefit of open source in general, and commercial open source in particular, is that you have the support of others as well as the ability to do the maintenance yourself.
I hope these questions will help you determine whether open source is a good fit for your next software project. Let me know if there are other questions you would add to this list.

Clonezilla Live 2.4.0-7 Released to Fix a Btrfs Issue, Based on Debian Sid

Steven Shiau has released a new development version of his Clonezilla Live operating system aimed at system administrators who want an easy-to-use, portable, and straightforward solution for cloning disk drives.

Lumina Desktop 0.8.3 Released!

The next version of the Lumina Desktop Environment has just been released!
This is mainly a bugfix release to correct an urgent issue with the system tray on FreeBSD 11, but there are a number of other slight improvements/updates included as well. The full list of changes is included at the bottom of this announcement, but the notable changes are as follows:
New Panel Plugin: “Application Launcher“
This allows the user to pin the shortcut for an application directly to a panel.
New Utility: “lumina-xconfig“
This utility allows the user to easily enable/disable additional monitors/screens within the desktop session.
Fix the issue with transparent system tray icons on FreeBSD 11
Add support for the XDG autostart specifications.

Latest News

11 Ways That Linux Contributes to Tech Innovation

Over the past six months I've asked new Linux Foundation corporate members on the cutting edge of technology to weigh in on what interesting or innovative trends they're witnessing and the role that Linux plays in them. Here's what engineers, CTOs, and other business leaders from companies including CoreOS, Rackspace, SanDisk, and more had to say.

Jessie Release Date: 2015-04-25

We now have a target release date of Saturday the 25th of April. We
have checked with core teams, and this seems to be acceptable for
everyone. This means we are able to begin the final preparations for
a release of Debian 8 - "Jessie".
The intention is only to lift the date if something really critical
pops up that is not possible to handle as an errata, or if we end up
technically unable to release that weekend.
Please keep in mind that we intend to have a quiet period from
Saturday the 18th of April. Bug fixes must be *in Jessie* before
then.